Guarani anger over teenager’s death 18 March 2013

If milk does a body so much good, why is US-produced milk banned in Europe? It turns out that in 1994, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the use of recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH). rBGH in milk is believed to increase the risk of cancer. In an attempt to protect its citizens from genetically-modified milk, the Codex Alimentarius Commission, the U.N. Food Safety Agency representing 101 nations worldwide, has banned rBGH milk in the 101 nations that it represents. Canada is another country where rBGH milk is banned.

The European Commission organized independent research to review the effect of rBGH on public health. Here is what they found:

“The public health committee confirmed earlier reports of excess levels of the naturally occurring Insulin-like-Growth Factor One (IGF-1), including its highly potent variants, in rBGH milk and concluded that these posed major risks of cancer, particularly of the breast and prostate, besides promoting the growth and invasiveness of cancer cells by inhibiting their programmed self-destruction (apoptosis).” Source: Samuel S. Epstein, M.D.

rBGH is another one of Monsanto’s genetically-engineered products that mimics the cow’s naturally-produced BGH hormone. American dairy farmers inject their cows with rBGH to increase how much milk each cow produced – usually by 20%. The use of rBGH results in cows also producing more IGF-1 hormone, to such excess that milk from rBGH-treated cows has up to 80% more IGF-1.

Researchers throughout the world argue that consumption of excess IGF-1 hormone, which is also found in humans, may result in a higher risk of breast, colon and prostate cancer. Yet, in the US, Monsanto and the milk industry do not clearly label which milk comes from rBGH-treated cows.

And the effect on humans is just one of the problems. The use of rBGH also has a serious effect on the animals. Here’s a short 3-minute video about Monsanto’s deception regarding rBGH.

The war between farming people and nomads is as old as farming itself. It’s not that the two cultures are incompatible. But the mind of a farming people can’t conceive of harmony with foragers. The minds of agriculturists can’t conceive of harmony with much of anything. I’ve known gentle farmers. But I’m using the word “farmer” here as shorthand for a bundle of concepts, principally for the “civilized” mind that views the wild world as a threat to be subdued or a fragile, off-limits temple, rather than the one source of life and home that can always provide. When humans were domesticated by agriculture about 10,000 years ago, one of the key prejudices bred into us was that the only way to survive was to control nature. We can easily see how this applies to wild, exterior nature: You survived winter not by learning what food the land still held, but by hard laboring to make the land give up a hoardable surplus. But more importantly, we have tamed our interior nature as well. Those who wouldn’t subdue their own wild nature were brought under control. To use the communal grain storage that farmers were told would let them survive winter, to have your fields protected from thieves, to buy protection from the powerful, farmers have always paid the local strongman. If they didn’t pay their tithe to those who guarded the grain surplus, the leader’s goons would force them to, or run them off, or kill them. The root of the word “lord” is “hlaford,” or “keeper of the loaves,” showing the ancient relationship between controlling grain and controlling people. And when the same elites wanted to build their monumental tombs, you worked for them, or they took your crops and enslaved

IF YOU’VE ever suspected politics is increasingly being run in the interests of big business, I have news: Jeffrey Sachs, a highly respected economist from Columbia University, agrees with you - at least in respect of the United States.

In his book, The Price of Civilisation, he says the US economy is caught in a feedback loop. ”Corporate wealth translates into political power through campaign financing, corporate lobbying and the revolving door of jobs between government and industry; and political power translates into further wealth through tax cuts, deregulation and sweetheart contracts between government and industry. Wealth begets power, and power begets wealth,” he says.

Sachs says four key sectors of US business exemplify this feedback loop and the takeover of political power in America by the ”corporatocracy”.

First is the well-known military-industrial complex. ”As [President] Eisenhower famously warned in his farewell address in January 1961, the linkage of the military and private industry created a political power so pervasive that America has been condemned to militarisation, useless wars and fiscal waste on a scale of many tens of trillions of dollars since then,” he says.

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Second is the Wall Street-Washington complex, which has steered the financial system towards control by a few politically powerful Wall Street firms, notably Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and a handful of other financial firms.

These days, almost every US Treasury secretary - Republican or Democrat - comes from Wall Street and goes back there when his term ends. The close ties between Wall Street and Washington ”paved the way for the 2008 financial crisis and the mega-bailouts that followed, through reckless deregulation followed by an almost complete lack of oversight by government”.

Third is the Big Oil-transport-military complex, which has put the US on the trajectory of heavy oil-imports dependence and a deepening military trap in the Middle East, he says.

”Since the days of John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Trust a century ago, Big Oil has loomed large in American politics and foreign policy. Big Oil teamed up with the automobile industry to steer America away from mass transit and towards gas-guzzling vehicles driving on a nationally financed highway system.”

Big Oil has consistently and successfully fought the intrusion of competition from non-oil energy sources, including nuclear, wind and solar power.

It has been at the side of the Pentagon in making sure that America defends the sea-lanes to the Persian Gulf, in effect ensuring a $US100 billion-plus annual subsidy for a fuel that is otherwise dangerous for national security, Sachs says.

”And Big Oil has played a notorious role in the fight to keep climate change off the US agenda. Exxon-Mobil, Koch Industries and others in the sector have underwritten a generation of anti-scientific propaganda to confuse the American people.”

Fourth is the healthcare industry, America’s largest industry, absorbing no less than 17 per cent of US gross domestic product.

”The key to understanding this sector is to note that the government partners with industry to reimburse costs with little systematic oversight and control,” Sachs says. ”Pharmaceutical firms set sky-high prices protected by patent rights; Medicare [for the aged] and Medicaid [for the poor] and private insurers reimburse doctors and hospitals on a cost-plus basis; and the American Medical Association restricts the supply of new doctors through the control of placements at medical schools.

”The result of this pseudo-market system is sky-high costs, large profits for the private healthcare sector, and no political will to reform.”

Now do you see why the industry put so much effort into persuading America’s punters that Obamacare was rank socialism? They didn’t succeed in blocking it, but the compromised program doesn’t do enough to stop the US being the last rich country in the world without universal healthcare.

It’s worth noting that, despite its front-running cost, America’s healthcare system doesn’t leave Americans with particularly good health - not as good as ours, for instance. This conundrum is easily explained: America has the highest-paid doctors.

Can’t find an english site report. This is translated via google.

In the Brussels Neder-over-Heembeek is Sunday a top executive of the oil company Exxon Mobil shot dead on the street. Nicholas Mock Ford got two bullets in the head when he was around 22 hours with his wife, an Italian restaurant left. Witnesses saw two men running away with a motorcycle helmet.

The man died on the way to hospital. His wife Mary was beaten and was covered in blood. Police and prosecutors currently hold into account all possible ways, from a settlement to a botched carjacking. Though it seems disproportionate force used for a car theft - especially since the killers the Lexus SUV just left standing. 

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hln.be%2Fhln%2Fnl%2F957%2FBinnenland%2Farticle%2Fdetail%2F1517870%2F2012%2F10%2F16%2FTopman-ExxonMobil-op-straat-geexecuteerd-na-avondje-uit-in-Brussel.dhtml&act=url

It is really more than capitalism. Capitalism is an element of civilization. Without civilization there would not be capitalism (just check any indigenous culture past or what few are still here).

That leaves us with root of the problem being civilization. Which, I said, by its nature denies the heart as a component of human existence. 

Without the heart, the ability to question what we think is the foundation of our existence never arises. We know nothing but civilization and if our mind questions it, the mind immediately wants alternatives and poses ‘problems’. The heart is required in addition to the mind to explore the problem of civilization honestly.

So, if anybody is really serious about considering civilization, then a good place to start is the book “Endgame” by Derrick Jensen. And since hardly anybody reads anymore, they made a dvd called “End Civ”.